Inside the Box: The True Story of My Real and Imagined Connection to K., the World, My Self, and Our Battle Against Solipsism Syndrome

by Phil Semler

The unnamed narrator grew up with K. in a pastoral suburb of San Francisco in the sixties. Both starred in Little League at local White Field. The narrator went on to a banal life, while K. became a baseball superstar, a .300 hitter, a symbol of masculinity, a New York television celebrity. But both suffered from their fathers’ tyranny. K. from his father’s dreams; the narrator from his father’s indifference and violence. Both were friends until the age of 15.
Inside the Box is a coming of age novel about a failed fiction writer, a fan, his obsession, his fall into mental illness from Solipsistic Syndrome, a condition coined by his Wittgensteinian psychiatrist Burnhard at San Francisco’s Zucked-Up General Hospital.
Both K. and the narrator suffered self-absorption, losing the psychic boundaries between you and me, world and mind, action and language. The narrator’s resurrects from existential despair by writing his fictional memoir called Inside the Box, while K. confronts his demons and finds happiness in his life after playing baseball.
For readers of fictional memoirs like Exley’s A Fan's Notes, psychoanalytic autobiography like Hesse’s Steppenwolf, autobiographical fiction like Halliday’s Asymmetry, and anything by Lethem, which investigates loss--whether in the form of person, memory, or language. Baseball and philosophical interest helpful, but not necessary. This is fiction.

478 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 16, 2019

About the author

Phil Semler is the author of 13 novels (most recently Scattered Parts), and 2 travel books. He lives in San Francisco with his wife.

Reviews

[David Cain · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant strange profound

One of the finest new novels in ages - writing that challenges and connects - a new world old school Infinite Jest